


Like an Audio Tape

by Diminua



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Fix-It of Sorts, M/M, Or history rewritten by a spell I'm not sure, POV Rupert Giles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-21
Updated: 2019-11-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:08:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21515797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Diminua/pseuds/Diminua
Summary: This feels like the last chapter of something I'm never going to get around to writing, but it seems to work by itself. So I'm posting.
Relationships: Rupert Giles/Ethan Rayne
Comments: 3
Kudos: 20





	Like an Audio Tape

Time spools back, like an audio tape. Or at least that’s the best analogy Rupert Giles can come up with.

Ethan Rayne leaning over the table in that ratty little place with the booths they used to go to with Jenny before she left for LA, before she realised she needed to watch Angel. Eyes wide and dark, promising that the night was still their time. Drinking beer from the bottle, tequila in shots.

Ethan, shame faced and bewildered and frightened, standing behind Buffy as she drove off a great leviathan.

The blazing row Giles had with him afterwards, like all their rows.

‘No sense of responsibility. Will you ever bloody well grow up..’

‘I didn’t know Ripper, I swear, it was just a.. something felt off, I did try to fix it..’

Ethan bringing chaos in his wake, only sorry when people got hurt.

Getting on better with Buffy after that.

Ethan muttering ‘They’re weaponising monsters. Oh wonderful’. Bickering with Spike about whisky, with Giles about Faith: ‘They’ll kill her, that’s why. For fuck’s sake Ripper get your head out of that bloody bowler hatted arse of yours and look straight at what the council really _is_ for a change.’

Ethan in Oxford, in the Bird and Baby, outraging old friends over sweet potato pie and a second large glass of the red, a steady backdrop of October drizzle. Ethan up early and bright-eyed next morning (no bloody hangover, just typical) making coffee and asking why everything in Ripper’s fridge was something dead.

‘Oh yes.’ Rupert had said bitterly, ‘I’d forgotten what a temple your body was.’

‘Didn’t find much fault with it last night.’ The same sentiment of a thousand times before in different words.

Ethan in Giles’ living room with Buffy and Willow and Xander the first time, the kids protesting: ‘But he sold us those Hallowe’en costumes.’

And Jenny, bless her, sipping the whisky Ethan had poured for them both and saying ‘Ok, I guess this is where we have the ‘ _grown up relationships are complicated’_ talk.’

Ethan lining up the tequila the night he buried the hellhound, singing ‘there were vampires dancing at the prom’ to the tune of Berkeley Square.

Ethan sending him postcards from Canton. Calling him from Liverpool, Bali, Nicaragua, always collect.

Ethan sitting with Jenny on the couch, with her still on her first drink, going through the incident in the school, how he’d begun the invocation of Eyghon, given Angelus something else to think about.

Saying it wouldn’t work a second time. He’d be expecting it.

Arguing (again) with Giles. ‘You can’t just sit and wait for your slayer to do it. You know when she’ll be ready? When he kills someone she cares about.’

Flicking through the watcher diaries. ‘Oh I get it, he kills Jenny, you go after him. He kills you. Then he has a grieving slayer without a watcher to help her out. By the time he picks her off she’s completely devastated. Thinks it’s all her fault. Or maybe he thinks he’ll turn her?’ Chucking the book down on the sofa. ‘Very sodding nice.’

Ethan on his bed in Primrose Hill, crosslegged, waiting for him. Strumming his guitar inexpertly. Picking out chords. Ethan storing records with Rupert for safekeeping. Buying second hand paperbacks and leaving them behind when he’d finished.

Ethan borrowing his jumpers, stealing his fags, saying ‘Don’t you ever get tired of playing the grown up Ripper?’ or (too many times to count) ‘Let’s go and get a proper drink.’

Ethan leaving rue on Randal’s grave.

Ethan hiding with him in a shack, the middle of nowhere, waiting for Eyghon. Reckoning without Willow and Buffy and Angel, leaving him half killed but free of the demon as it fled danger to invade the ‘dead’ vampire.

Coughing and complaining ‘You couldn’t just have cut off my head like we’d agreed?’

‘Clearly not.’

Ethan on his knees at three in the morning, cutting across the meat of his fingers and clenching his hands into fists to drip blood between into the shallow fire he’d lit. Penance for telling Giles how to end the Hallowe’en curse.

The smell of sandalwood and spice and ambergris.

The scratch of chalk on a concrete floor.

The laying out of cards. His own deck of tarot cards, kept wrapped in sky-blue silk and treated with respect. Or playing cards, palmed and cheated with and used for magic tricks. For distraction, misdirection.

Ethan hotwiring a car. Rewiring a shop. Building a radio. Singing the hippopotamus song as he did the washing up, water everywhere.

Ethan sitting on the tailgate of the minibus, Spike’s hipflask in his hand. ‘He told me to look after it.’

Putting it away, undrunk.


End file.
